Fashion in the Nineties: What it was like to be there

I have hundreds of magazines. Not virtual ones – real ones. And although my collection started in the early Eighties, it wasn’t until the Nineties – during my university years – that I truly began to connect to the images in these inspiring, visual, cultural feasts.

I left university in the mid-Nineties and started working for a young designer called Lisa Johnson. She designed the fabulous wooden-heeled strappy shoes of the moment, created with the manufacturer of the famous Vivienne Westwood rocker shoe.

I must have sent these shoes to every shoot in London at the time, sitting in a store cupboard, glamorously relishing just writing the names of the photographers and stylists on the parcels. Then one day there was a fashion emergency – Corinne Day needed the only silver versions of them immediately and I was to actually drop them off personally at her flat in Soho.

This was the height of the Kate-Moss-and-Corinne-Day era and I can thankfully say my bubble wasn’t burst in any way. I was welcomed into her home like a friend – “fancy a cup of tea?” The decoration was as sparse as my Notting Hill bedsit and I vividly remember a huge Dualit toaster. Tea and toast, what’s not to love?

There was – and still is – a lingering negativity around the Nineties era, sometimes dubbed “heroin chic”. Looking back now, I guess there was a much more youthful aesthetic than today. In the magazines boobs were small, when they were visible – which was quite often – and this can portray youth and naivety.

For me, there was never a sexiness to the model images – it was almost a boyishness I could relate to. Also, in that decade I was young – impressionable I guess – but not stupid. I aspired to the images in the magazines but also related to them. I didn’t want to look grown up, I just wanted to buy the clothes and live that life. Now I look back at it, I did and loved it.

A few years ago, I was in a cab in Soho dropping off a colleague following a particularly slow work social event. As we pulled up outside her apartment block I had a sense of déjà vu and remarked, “Wow, I remember coming here about 20 years ago – Corinne Day used to live on the top floor.”

“Yes,” she replied. “That’s the flat I live in. When the estate agent showed us round, he highlighted the marks on the wood floor where Kate Moss used to dance.”

For some reason I wasn’t surprised – only the Nineties would be cool enough to leave scuff marks as a legacy.